Reading the Hobbit for the.
Reading the Hobbit for the...fourth? time with Coop. Noticing all kinds of weirdness. Like besides the goblins inventing guns and bombs and burglars advertising their services with particular runes on their doors.
So the wood elves don't go across the sea into the west like the other elves. Forget about anything in LotR or whatever else. In the Hobbit it says they don't, but the other elves, High, Light, Deep, and Sea elves do. Elrond is a High Elf. Fuckin' three other kinds of elves? DEEP elves?
Also, Rankin Bass elves are the best elves. Mirkwood wood elves do not sow. They take.
Deep elves were almost gnomes el oh el
ReplyDeleteI love creepy elves!
ReplyDeleteand Elrond was only "half" elven.
ReplyDeleteI got a reprint of the first edition and there's some weird shit in there. Like, Elrond is a kind of high elf that, when he gets old and wise, becomes a gnome.
ReplyDeleteDaniel Lofton what
ReplyDeletenoldor represent
ReplyDeleteChristopher Hatty I misremebered a bit, but: "Elrond knew all about runes of every kind. That day he looked at the swords they had brought from the trolls' lair, and he said: "These are not troll-make. They are old swords, very old swords of the elves that are now called Gnomes..."
ReplyDeleteAnd yeah, it was changed to noldor later, I guess.
Yeh, Tolkien used Gnome similar to the Greek Gnosis, "to know". Meaning knowledgeable elves. He changed it to Noldor, because "gnome" was already being taken up by the garden variety of gnome in mainstream culture.
ReplyDeleteI was a Tolkien nerd in high school and I have his short stories and "unfinished tales" books. I haven't read them in over a decade but there's all kinds of crazy stuff in there. Like in one of the early versions of a Silmarilion story, Sauron is a cat and he lives in some kind of cat tower mountain fort that only he can reach because he can jump from platform to platform, y'know, like a cat.
ReplyDeleteAll the stuff like the various kinds of elves are excelent examples of initial bursts of imagination unrestrained by any particular structure that then get sanitized and calcified over time by world building. It's like going from some DIY D&D DM's weird home game notes to 40 years of Forgotten Realms lore.
Just finished re-reading it myself, the weirdness is wonderful seasoning you don't get anywhere else.
ReplyDeleteElrond being "half-elven" only means he was born of an elf and a man. He was able to choose whether to be elf or man. D&D got it wrong.
ReplyDeleteGregor Vuga , now I want to dig out my old History of Middle Earth books... There's some great stuff in those.
ReplyDeleteCraig Hatler
ReplyDeleteyeah, and his twin brother chose to go Human.
weird stuff.
Elves and Men were closer in "relationship" biologically than D&D elves and humans, I suppose. More about identity than species.
ReplyDeleteCraig Hatler I had similar notion. I was like "Maybe Elf is a... I dunno... position."
ReplyDeleteOh man, this is so rad. How did I forget all this?
ReplyDeleteYou'd think you'd remember, right?
ReplyDeleteAlso, Gandalf chucks a lot of fireballs and other flashy magic. Like, all the time.
When they get hambushed by goblins in the mountains it reads more like Gandalf has a shotgun :)
ReplyDeleteI am most of the way through Fellowship. I have not read them since Return of the King came out in theaters. I used to read Lord of the Rings every couple years, I've been really slacking.
ReplyDeleteMy wife keeps talking about wanting to read Harry Potter to the kids. I look at her like "Hobbit, Please!"